Ubuntu shipped with a bug that they introduced by way of a very badly done patch. While I get your point, I don't think it's fair to use Ubuntu as a source - they're grossly incompetent when it comes to handling ZFS.
Your entire argument hinges on the claim that he's presenting himself as a journalist. He's not doing that. You're not arguing in good faith and it's clear you have an axe to grind - so I'm going to disengage now.
An op-ed is an outside opinion piece published by a news organization, historically in a print newspaper or magazine.
It's irrelevant if he's giving his opinion on a subject in a YouTube video; it's still not journalism (and it's not even an op-ed, since he's effectively self-publishing).
There's nothing even preventing the second form from working either. Just put the right shebang at the top of the script and it'll run through that interpreter. I've been on fish for a decade, but still write all my shell scripts in Bash. It's never been an issue.
Yeah. Unfortunately, ZFS encryption is missing a few creature comforts of something like LUKS. I've stuck with native OpenZFS mechanisms, though, to keep the complexity sprawl to a minimum.
Quick note on #2 - there aren't really any issues with storing your encryption root passphrase in a file. If the file is owned by root, with no read permissions for any account, only root can access it. Since it's stored on an encrypted dataset, and your initramfs is as well, it's unreadable when the machine is off. Lastly, if anybody _does_ have a root shell on your machine, they can change the encryption passphrase without needing to know the current value.
In short, I'm not sure there are any real issues with having it on disk but unreadable by anybody but root.
I booted a G4 Mac the other day, running 10.4.something. I was thrown back in time to a period where OS X was clearly their flagship software stack. Everything was coherent and cohesive - and shockingly - fast. I'd daily 10.4 again if it could operate on the modern internet comfortably!
Snapdragon support is decent to great these days, and importantly it's all in the mainline kernel tree.
Edit: though it should be said that what I think is good might be a far cry from you think is good. I did use a Thinkpad X13s as my primary work machine for 6 months, though.